Tag Archives: jalapenos

This week is my last week on vacation, my last week before the new semester begins.

I’ve been on a sort of perpetual vacation since May. I’ve traveled more this summer than any other summer in my life. First, the time in China and then a week in Maine with my family and Simona (pictures, recipes, and videos to come!).

It’s funny, but now that I’m home, I’m finding myself in love with the little seaside town where I live–in love with it in a way I’ve never been before. When I first moved here, I thought it was a beautiful place. Everything was fun and new and exciting. Everything was a delight, a discovery. I came here for grad school and meant to stay for three years.

Fast forward almost ten years later. I’m still here. And in between then and now, I’ve felt a range of emotions about this little city. I’ve resented it. Felt trapped, stuck. It was too Southern, too small, too hot. We were too far from our families.

But over the past couple years, my feelings toward my home have softened. Shifted.

Now that I’m back, I’m realizing that I haven’t been looking at this place with clear eyes in a good, long while. Funny, how months away from this place can bring me home feeling entirely different. The city hasn’t changed–it’s me.

Now that I’m back, I’m seeing this place the way a tourist would. I’m delighting in the ocean, the turquoise waves and the broken shells and the pier. The bike paths that lead me from campus, where I work, to the shore, to the waves, to the forever ocean, in six short miles.

It’s been raining for days now, our yards and streets flooding, but today the sun broke through. I got in my car and drove to the beach, to a little seafood shop selling local fish, mussels, clams, and shrimp. I bought a beautiful fillet of snapper and a couple bags of mussels.

I thought about a bike ride to the ocean we took a week ago with a friend. We sat on the sand and watched the waves, and I realized, somewhere very deep inside my bones, that it is not an accident that I have not been able to leave the ocean. I grew up twenty minutes from the Atlantic Ocean, for all but the first four years of my life. And I have stayed about that far from it. There is something in this view, in the crashing waves, one after another, in the salt spray, in the gritty sand, in the blinding sun, there is something in that vista that I crave, that I need, that sustains me.

So today I bought my fish, a piece of fish so fresh it smelled of nothing but the sea at its best, and walked to my car in the sun.

I thought to the beginning of this summer, just before the semester ended, when Simona wrote a post about sound and listening and fish tacos. I decided to revisit the dish, using recipes from the August issue of Bon Appétitfor fried fish tacos this time. It felt fitting, a beginning and an end, the wrapping of one semester and the beginning of another. I am still in the same place, physically yes, but not very much is the same.

When I came home this afternoon, I pickled jalapeños and made hot sauce with gorgeous red Fresno chiles. I made slaw and cut into a ripe avocado. And fried up the snapper that not that long ago was swimming not too far from where I live.

“I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.” M.F.K. Fisher